WF4: How to Unit Test a Workflow that calls a WCF Service

WF4: How to Unit Test a Workflow that calls a WCF Service

“The important point is that our test can’t control what that dependency returns to our code under test or how it behaves (if we wanted to simulate an exception, for example). That’s when we use stubs.” – The Art of Unit Testing - Roy Osherove,

Yesterday morning I received an email from Ryo in Belgium who asked for help in unit testing a workflow. Ryo had read my previous posts on Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting.XamlInjector and wanted to use it to test his workflow but was having trouble. I gave him a quick suggestion and a little later he wrote back still having trouble and sent me some test code so I decided to fix it for him. Several hours later I had a new update to Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting which I will share with you now.

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Scenario: Unit Testing a Workflow that calls a WCF service

Given

A console application with a self-hosted WCF Calculator Service

A WF4 Workflow that

Accepts arguments to pass to the WCF service

and uses Send and ReceiveReply activities to invoke the WCF Service

and returns the result to the caller

A Unit Test that runs the workflow and verifies that the workflow returns correct output when provided correct input

When

The unit test is run

and the console application is not running

Then

The unit test should complete successfully

What Are We Testing Exactly?

In this scenario there are two components.

The WCF Calculator Service

The Workflow which has a dependency on the service

As Roy Osherove said in the quote at the top of this post we want to avoid external dependencies in our unit testing. We should test both components in isolation such that one does not depend on the other at test time.

To eliminate the WCF Service from our unit test we will use stubs. In our workflow there are two activities that need to be replaced with a stub.

Activity

Behavior

Stub Behavior

Send

Sends a message to the service. If the service cannot be reached the activity will throw an exception

Do nothing, assume that the message will be sent succesfully.

ReceiveReply

Receives a response from the service and stores the value in variables or arguments in the workflow

Store an expected response in the variables or arguments of the workflow

When you create a stub you create an object that has the same method signature. Activities in Workflow also have a signature. The way to see it clearly is to look at the XAML. Here is the Send activity.

You can see that it has a number of properties that need to be duplicated in the stub send activity. The goal is to rewrite the XAML so that all we do is replace Send with SendStub. Everything else should remain the same. Sounds simple right? I thought so too until I tried to create one. The good news is that after several hours, I came up with a set of messaging stub activities that are now in the latest release of Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting so you won’t have to build them. Using these stubs I was able to create a unit test that implemented our scenario perfectly.

using Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting.Stubs;

[TestClass]

publicclass UnitTest1

{

/// <summary>

/// Invokes the Workflow but does not actually send or receive messages.

/// </summary>

/// <remarks>

/// This type of test can validate the logic of the workflow without sending/receiving messages.

/// It does this by replacing the messaging activities with stubs as it creates a